A couple of days before Christmas, Brad Bryner stopped in at Jo Jo’s Convenient Store on North Main Street and bought a $20 scratch ticket game of the Illinois Lottery’s Merry Millionaire. Mega lottery

Today, Brad and his wife Dawn are super excited as their Merry Millionaire scratch ticket turned out to be a million-dollar winner.

Lottery official Mike Lang came to Jo Jo’s Friday to present them with their million-dollar check. Powerball lottery

Lang also presented a $10,000 check to Kenny Ryan, owner of Jo Jo’s. Ticket sellers are paid one percent of the value of winning tickets.

Brad Bryner said that in the last six months, he only bought three or four lottery tickets. But for some reason, he purchased the Merry Millionaire ticket Dec. 23.

He said that at first he scratched off the ticket and thought it wasn’t a winner. So he went to the Illinois Lottery Web site to enter the ticket in a second chance drawing.

“It kept coming back invalid,” he said. “So I started checking over the numbers again,” and saw that it matched.

“I didn’t really believe it at first,” he said. But then, his son and wife looked at the ticket and they also said it appeared to be a million-dollar winner.

The couple took the ticket to the lottery office in Springfield earlier this month, and there it was confirmed that they’d won the big prize.

“We had to wait till we went to Springfield to confirm it for sure,” he said.

Dawn didn’t also believe it when her husband told her they’d won big.

“He’s kind of a prankster, and I thought, something must not be right,” she said.

The couple has said they expect to put their winnings to good use.

The owners of Say It! Signs, plan to pay off the mortgage on the building on West Sixth Street that used to house their business.

Dawn is a full-time nursing student, and their 16-year-old son will soon be in college, so they will apply their lottery winnings to those expenses.

Ryan is a lottery winner himself. A few years ago he won a $2 million lottery prize, also on a $20 scratch ticket.

“You sell a lot of those here, don’t you?” Lang asked him. “We do,” Ryan said.

Ryan said Jo Jo’s sells about $2,000 worth of lottery tickets a day. “It’s one of our bigger sales outlets,” Lang said.

But, after this win, along with their reputation as a place to buy winning lottery tickets (a $50,000 winner was also purchased at the store), Jo Jo’s will probably be selling even more tickets now.

As Lang presented large checks to the Bryners and Ryan, people were lining up at the counter to buy their tickets.

As for Ryan, he said he just got married, so at least some of the money will go to help pay for the wedding.

Congratulations to all of them and we hope this helps them start off 2012 well.